Bully no more

January 29, 2019  •  Leave a Comment

One of the great truths of the playground... and sometimes of the natural world... is that if you stand up to bullies, they typically back down. This happened to me in the sixth grade, when I stood my ground against a nemesis, and history seems to be repeating itself at the suet feeder. Our recent guest, a Yellow-bellied Sapsucker, has been making life miserable for the woodpecker's smaller relatives and simply keeping them for getting a mouthful of necessary fat. But recently, a Red-bellied Woodpecker—typically a common bird around here but pretty scarce this winter—appeared at the suet and when the YBS tried to play the spoiler, the Red-bellied essentially said, Get lost... or something similar in bird parlance. The sapsucker somehow knew it had been trumped and went into deferential mode.


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